Voices from Beyond
Open Letter to DC Bishop Who Lectured Trump
At a prayer service in Washington, DC, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde lectured President Trump and Vice President Vance on the threat they pose to the agenda of woke “progressives.”
At a prayer service in Washington, DC, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde lectured President Trump and Vice President Vance on the threat they pose to the agenda of woke “progressives.”
By William A. Donohue, Ph.D., Catholic League President
January 22, 2025
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde
Episcopal Church House
Mount St. Alban
Washington, D.C. 20016
Dear Bishop Budde:
At the January 21 prayer service at Washington National Cathedral that featured President Trump, you mentioned that “people in our country are scared now.” You singled out people who “may not be citizens or have the proper documentation,” as well as LGBTQ persons. These people “fear for their lives.” You then made a plea to “find compassion.”
Your commitment to compassion is noble, but it is misplaced.
I work in New York City, and I witness daily how many New Yorkers are “scared” and “fear for their lives.” They are afraid of being mugged, beaten, raped and killed, often by people who have crashed our borders, people you refer to as lacking “proper documentation.” They, and in some cases their surviving families, are deserving of compassion. More than that, they are deserving of justice, and that means that illegal alien criminals must be apprehended and deported.
You are right to call attention to violence against LGBTQ persons. They have every right to be “scared” and “fear for their lives.” What you don’t mention is that the people who are most likely to victimize them are people just like them. In other words, it is not heterosexual guys who are beating up on gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons—it is people in their own ranks. It is called “intimate partner violence,” and the studies show how prevalent it is among LGBTQ persons.
In 2022, Psycom Pro, a psychiatry resource for clinicians, concluded that “More than half of transgender individuals experience partner violence or gender identity abuse.”
In 2020, seven experts published a study in the American Journal of Public Health on this subject and concluded that “Transgender individuals experience a dramatically higher prevalence of IPV [intimate partner violence] victimization compared with cisgender individuals [those who accept their sex identity], regardless of sex assigned at birth.”
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reviewed the literature on this subject and found that “43.8% of lesbian women and 61.1% of bisexual women have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime, as opposed to 35% of cisgender women.” It also found that transgender individuals experienced the highest rate of intimate partner violence.
The Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA Law, reviewed a number of studies on this subject. One of them found that “31.1% of transgender people and 20.4% of cisgender people had ever experienced IPV or dating violence.” It also said that three studies concluded that the lifetime intimate partner sexual violence prevalence among transgender people ranged from “25.0% to 47.0%.”
Even in sympathetic pop culture magazines, such as Portland Monthly, it is acknowledged that “statistically speaking, the most common perpetrators of violence against trans women are domestic partners.”
In short, misdirected compassion is not virtuous. You need to make a public statement addressing the fallacies of your remarks.
Sincerely,
William A. Donohue, Ph.D.
President
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William A. Donohue, Ph.D. is President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The Catholic League is the nation’s largest Catholic civil rights organization defending individual Catholics and the institutional Church against defamation and discrimination.
Dr. Donohue is the author of several books, including his most recent, Cultural Meltdown: The Secular Roots of Our Moral Crisis. Dr. Donohue is a contributor and strong supporter of Beyond These Stone Walls.
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